I periodically revisit the links at the bottom of my reading list (managed by pocket) to see if I can either dump them from the list unread, leave them there for reading at an unspecified future point or ideally read them and push them to my archive.

Having done this recently these 4 links from 2014 stood out. All of them talk about the way the world is today, and are particularly interesting to me as they could all just as easily have been published this year (with some small changes no doubt).

And that trend, which has spilled out to the rest of the developed world, is leading to the growing anger of voters and the resistance to globalisation which may eventually cause even more damage to business and investors.

This link is a guide to Shenzhen, almost certainly out of date in some regard (I’m no Shenzhen expert), but the reality of the Chinese tech markets is fascinating and although it took me nearly 3 years to read this I’m still glad i did.

Hammond was in the limelight recently, having claimed that by 2025 90% of the news read by the general public would be generated by computers. “That doesn’t mean that robots will be replacing 90% of all journalists, simply that the volume of published material will massively increase,” he explains. “Take the example of small amateur baseball games. They don’t interest the media, but several dozen people follow each one. Quill collates data on thousands of these games and can produce thousands of articles almost instantaneously, one for each match, in a style similar to sportswriters, who are easy to imitate.”

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I’m more than slightly fed up with the huge amount of writing about the US administration that has been dominating my reading sources since the trump election. It’s understandable, of course even fundamentally important actually, and I’ve been duly consuming a lot of it to try and keep up, but I just want to get some texture back into my reading.

So, to that end this linkdump is an attempt to draw a small line under the one topic I’ve been reading more about than anything else since November 2016. I’m not signing off completely, but I am trying to re-balance what I’m reading. You’ll be able to form a quick opinion about where I sit on the question of Trump and Bannon from the sources, let alone the content of these pieces, but there are also a number of well written essays/articles here that I think are sincere and informative regardless of which side your opinions trend towards.

The Economist tries to be even handed in a high level view of the Trump administration recognising the potential for improved domestic economics while worrying about the fragility of the western world order built by the US since WW2, and largely, of course, built for the US also.

Politico offers up an overview of the kind of secrets that will now be available to Trump. Very interesting and slightly scary, regardless of who holds power.

There are a bunch of pieces raising the alarm about Steve Bannon. Some are focused on where he comes from, politically, and what he has previously claimed to be his political goals, others worry specifically about his elevation to the National Security Council.

Foreign Policy puts together a really good piece about how incoming administrations commonly make structural changes and how a raft of seemingly innocuous decisions can be massively important. It holds the view that the Trump/Bannon setup isn’t great but the real value here is to understand the underlying reasons and history of these kind of changes. As the headline suggests understanding these things helps us to answer the question of who is the power behind the throne.

There has been quite a lot of comment about whether we are seeing a slow structural dissoultion of democracy and a move through populism to autocracy. I’ve included this essay because it is laying down some markers, before the event, that we can monitor easily enough, that can help us worry, or hopefully help us to not worry.

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I’ve been using twitter to capture my linkdumps. But i’ve never really liked using twitter. I think it has use as a broadcast medium (if you have 10-100’s of thousands of followers), but is a terrible content firehose unless you follow maybe only 8 people and i’m not fussed about capturing running commentaries on, well, anything really.

Twitter is a great thing for certain types of real time information, so I won’t be deleting my account.It was the only relevant news source during the London riots, for example, that gave me the comfort to go back to bed safe in the knowledge that my street wasn’t going to get overrun. But I am going to try and revisit using this blog as my online home again, capturing mostly linkdumps admittedly, but hopefully getting some writing going again too.

To that end this 1st dump will be somewhat retrospective and will capture most of what I’ve dumped to twitter over the last year. Favourites marked.